What an unfortunate waste of time if you want to have fun in 2021, it is tough to justify playing a “retro” game unless you have some emotional connection to the console, the genre or the games themselves. Growing up, my family couldn’t afford consoles and my only interaction was watching friends play with them or talk about playing with them. I don’t have the privilege of having experience with console-control affordances. I am mostly a PC gamer because my school had computers I could interact with.
However, by virtue of having been assigned this mode of inquiry by instructors I respect, I went and picked a game to play. Initially I wanted to a Metroid-vania game, since the genre still very much exists and I could draw some historic lesson from a game like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but someone has snuck in and stole it from the Crerar Library (?). I chose to believe that any of the console games made before 1998 inherently had something to teach us, so I settled down with Super Punch-Out!! based on a MADD Center employee’s advice (thanks Steele Citrone) and I was frustrated for hours. Why is that interesting?
Super Punch-Out!! might be a boxing game in terms of the narrative and visual “skin” of the game, and the game’s “fighting” mechanics might be incredibly simple/dull/boring/mind-numbing—but its extra-diegetic ludology, the way it is aware of and manipulates the affective frustrations of a player to force them into coming up with solutions is reminiscent of the scientific process. It incentivizes the player to employ inductive reasoning to figure out how to beat each level, and can thus be thought of as a non-didactic way of teaching about the scientific process of hypothesis generation, experimentation, data analysis and theory formulation.
Me, right now (2021)
The game’s narrative consists of three different circuits that a player can play through, with various opponents that each pose a unique “puzzle” as to how to beat them. The diegetic mechanic landscape is also simple. The controller allows the player to dodge left, right or backwards with the directional buttons. It lets the player block with the up button. It also affords two different simple punches, which happened to be on the B and Y buttons for me, and a “super punch” that was on the A button. These seemingly trivial actions, inspired by boxing, allow the player to give inputs into their boxer character on screen as he fights other boxers.
Each opponent has a specific way the player needs to figure out to beat them. The player might have to dodge in the correct direction within the time frame after an opponent gives a visual cue, such as charging up a punch; or strike where the opponents hands aren’t guarding them. For example, the “Bear-Hugger” opponent has a thick belly that makes him immune to normal punches. After punching him in various ways, dodging out of his way, and still not being able to figure out how to knock-him out for 3 minutes, I lost to him. I repeat this time and time again, becoming very frustrated as to the lack of visual ques the game gives you. There’s seemingly no rhyme or reason as to what I should be doing, no amount of strategizing or creative problem solving will help me here. As such, none of my “cross-industry” skills help me here. Perhaps if I had played console games more, or fighting games more, it wouldn’t have taken me this long. But eventually, I asked around and did a bit of googling, and realized that I had a “super punch” in the A button that could be charged up. When the opponent did a taunt, I punched him in the belly, and then when he made a silly face, I charged up a super punch to knock him out.
In a way, the frustration of unsatisfactory results led me to seek advice from others. We do that often in the lab, in science in general. Then, I formulated various hypotheses for each opponent, when I think I should hit them, what I think their weaknesses are, what the answer to each puzzle is. I would test it by trying out sequences, failing, losing many times. I would then analyze my data, evaluate the results of each combo to see which works better. I would then reformulate my theory, go back to each enemy and beat them. In that way, I think this game could serve as a great example to have a young person have a tangible experience with the scientific process without realizing it. And afterwards when told about inductive reasoning, they would have first-hand experience of doing it!
Thus, even though it was made in the 90s with very simple mechanics and visuals, Super Punch-Out!! is actually a really good example of how to implicitly imbue a game with the gist of science. That is particularly interesting to me as I work with STAGE Labs to develop games about quantum mechanics, to make it accessible and interesting to a broader audience! We don’t want the games to simply be re-skinned quantum versions of old games, like Quantum Monopoly or whatever. We want the diegetic mechanics to obey quantum rules or extra-diegetic elements to invoke quantum phenomena, so that people will think in terms of quantum without being explicitly told to do so. There’s something to be learned from Super Punch-Out!! about the affective feelings a game causes, and what actions that might lead the player to take outside of the game. Perhaps there’s a way we can implement that in our game design process to make our players think about a quantum problem, or do something quantum…
